Scammers

I received a message on my mobile phone yesterday - I didn’t take much notice at the time because I didn’t recognise the name. While catching up with email late last night I remembered the notification and went off in search of the message. It’s worth noting that I can never remember which app somebody has messaged me on - I end up checking private messages across all of the popular social networks. Quite why they can’t interoperate with each other is another story (Google tried to get everybody to agree on a protocol years ago, and gave up because Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn wouldn’t agree). Anyway. I finally found the message in Instagram, and a smile spread across my face. The sender appeared to be a beautiful blonde woman, with a candid profile photo taken in a stair-well - her hair pulled scraped back into a ponytail. Call me cynical, but before messaging back, I did a reverse-image-search on the profile photo - to find out where else it had appeared on the internet. Surprisingly, nowhere. Could it be a really good AI generated photo? Next, I took a look at her Instagram account. It was filled with hundreds of shares of other people’s content - all posted within a few hours. “She” had followed hundreds of people, but only fifteen people had followed her. She was following a very specific demographic - men, aged perhaps fifty and upwards. They all looked like they looked after themselves, and all went by their real names. The people that had followed her in return were all male, and all quite a bit older - perhaps sixties and seventies. I replied to her message with a non-commital “Where do I know you from?” to see if “she” might make an immediate mistake. No immediate reply was forthcoming, so I forgot all about “her”, and made a mental note to check today. I just remembered. Her account is gone. Deleted. I wonder how many of those approached reported the account on-sight? I wonder how many people “she” engaged in conversation? I wonder how far “she” got through her script with each of them? The reason I remembered about the message today was because I saw a wonderful prank we can all play on scammers - add them all to group chats! I almost fell off my chair laughing when I saw the first message too; “Hi all, I know you’re all desperate to get in touch with me, and you all love making new friends - so I thought it would be easier if we all joined the same group chat! Feel free to introduce yourselves!” Genius.